“NO ONE PLAYED THE ROLE BETTER”
GUTHRIE, OKLAHOMA—RONALD Reagan and Jane Wyman have just entered Hollywood’s Cocoanut Grove circa 1940. The director is shouting “action” and the extras at the famous nightclub begin to chat amongst themselves and sip their cocktails. Too tame, so the director shouts again. “Action!” Not good enough. “Action!” Each time the directive comes with more urgency, suggesting that the scene lacks the requisite enthusiasm.
No, this isn’t a decades-old movie starring the famous actors, it is the set of the September 2020 shooting of a movie titled Reagan, and it stars Dennis Quaid as the title character and Mena Suvari as his first wife. Subbing for the Cocoanut Grove is a Masonic temple that sits on 10 acres in Guthrie, Oklahoma, a site that also doubles for the Oval Office and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin where Reagan pleaded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
The movie is one of the signs of conservative resilience in notoriously liberal Hollywood: a biopic of a man whose loyalty to the Christian right and hard line against communism earned him a landslide reelection in 1984, winning 49 of 50 states. Reagan’s campaign cry four years earlier might sound familiar even to those who weren’t alive at the time: “Let’s Make America Great Again.” The script touches only briefly on perceived Reagan flaws such as his slowness in addressing the AIDS crisis, but the filmmakers say the work is no hagiography.
“The greatest challenge is not to be a super-fan,” says producer Mark Joseph. “There’s a lot of
